The invention relates generally to Instant Messaging, a recently ubiquitous service. More particularly, the invention relates to techniques for enabling users to instantly exchange their messages, such as conversations, opinions or feedback that are not necessarily secure or sensitive, simultaneously in a simple and easy way.
Instant Messaging (“IM”) is a form of digital communication in which messages are exchanged between users in near real-time [U.S. Pat. No. 7,720,082].
The proliferation of such a service has tremendously improved the efficiency and convenience of digital communications. Yet a problem endemic in instant messaging services is the need for simultaneous exchange of messages such that messages are exchanged between a fixed sending user and a fixed target user(s) with an exactly the same order.
In the existing form of exchange, the messages are ordered, e.g. by time or by appearance. As a result multiple messages cannot be exchanged with exactly the same order. From the user point of view the exchange order of messages is not necessarily about the precision/granularity of the time, e.g. seconds or milliseconds, but the order itself. This exchange order of messages should be simultaneous wherein the exchange order does not give privilege to a content.
However, due to the inherent order of messages in IM, there is a limit on the level of identity/novelty of such ordered messages. This can damage, e.g. substantially reducing the probability of, the novelty of the messages that has been exchanged after other messages. Since in IM, the later messages can be influenced by the earlier messages. The said damage can be that severe to reduce the probability of the originality of messages down to zero. This damage in psychology can be interpreted as “herd mentality” or “bandwagon effect”.
The bandwagon effect is a psychological behaviour whereby people follow something mainly because other people are following it; Herd mentality, or mob mentality, explains the influence people are receiving from their peers. These physiological behaviours are materialized in IM when a user wants to expresses its opinion on a subject that some other users already expressed their opinions on the said subject and their opinions are available to the said user. This availability biased the said user to blindly align its opinion to the already expressed opinions. Therefore, overcoming the said limit has significant advantageous for avoiding a user to affect (an)other user(s) and hence improving crowd wisdom, decentralized decision making and group intelligent.
To avoid the said effects, we have to increase the said probability of the originality of messages. However, IM is unable to increase the said probability due to its inherent order of messages.
The term “instant simultaneous message” as used herein means an instant messaging that is structured to ensure that certain messages are exchanged with exactly the same order between a fixed sending user and a fixed target user(s).
In the case of daily conversations in IM, instant simultaneous message can ensure that the participants are exchanging their opinion about a subject at the same order without affecting each other using their mobile phones or web or computers.
Prior art has developed various approaches to overcome the simultaneous or fair electronic exchange in a general domain. The approaches are limited into two participants by cryptographic methods or electronic exchange protocols. The developed approaches are usually asking for some of the followings:                adding more layers of complexity [U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,326]        adding more rounds of transmission [Luby et al. in a paper titled “How to simultaneously exchange a secret bit by flipping a symmetrically-biased coin” in proc. of the 24th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1983, pp 11-22]        adding third fully-trusted [S. P. Ketchpel and H. Garcia-Molina in a paper titled “Making trust explicit in distributed commerce transactions” in proc. of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 1996, pp 270-281] or semi-trusted parties [U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,436]        unsatisfactory or hard to achieve assumptions in practice such as signing contracts [M. Blum in an article titled “How to exchange (secret) keys” in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 1, No. 2, May 1983, pp. 175-193].        
Nevertheless, the added layers or requested assumptions, such as the level of trustworthy of the participants, not only greatly increases the overhead but sometimes only merely procrastinate the originally requested guarantee that is needed for the instant simultaneous messaging.
Moreover, the focus of the above mentioned prior art is on the general case of electronic exchange, not exploiting IM properties, and/or is only between two participants, e.g. a single sending and a single target.
In addition, prior art has also developed approaches and interfaces for multiple sessions of instant messaging [U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/047,144 and 09/727,182]. These approaches are overcoming the problem of performing multiple of the conventional Instant Messaging at a single time. However, these approaches cannot perform an instant simultaneous messaging, i.e. simultaneous communication between a fixed sending user and a fixed target user(s), that can heal the said herd mentality problem.
Instant Messaging contains returning users, i.e. not one-time users. This shows the intrinsic motivation of users to participate/interact with their preferred community of people, i.e. users are self-motivated to contribute. Furthermore, a user who avoids or breaks an instant simultaneous message in IM is not only losing any possible advantage such as accessing the existing simultaneously exchanged messages but also is punishable for its future use. However, the prior art is not taking into account any of these properties of IM, e.g. self-motivated, multiple exchanges of instant simultaneous messages, a history of instant simultaneous messages, and plurality of instant simultaneous messages as well as plurality of sending/target users.
Furthermore, users in IM have a kind of “social force”, such as a motivation to contribute by expressing opinion or a business force that comes from a supervisor, that keeps users to voluntarily contribute. This force will reduce the probability of users to discontinue an instant simultaneous message in the middle of its process. Therefore, a complex method, such as the prior art, in this domain is an overestimation of the problem that diminishes the volunteer contribution of users.